In a snowy underwater jungle

Every few days I pull up a stool and aim the camera at the community in my little aquarium. Yesterday, I took over 100 shots; two were usable, with a possible third to be processed. Par for the course.

I love it when one hermit goes for a walk on a blade of eelgrass, above the jungle below.

Small hermit, running, on waving eelgrass, halfway across the tank, but near the light. And the water is nearly clear up here. Auto lighting, auto noise filter. Piece of cake!

Most of the crab and hermit crab activity, however, goes on down on the floor, amid scraps of seaweeds, worms, copepods, amphipods, snails, waving antennae, limpet poop, dancing sand grains, rolling stones, broken shells, waving anemone and barnacle tentacles.

And algae. Algae covers everything, including the glass I'm shooting through. No matter how I scrub it, there's always some there, caught in the scratches on the glass. The hermits and crabs are responsible for these scratches; they're always banging about with the sharp edges of their shells, or piling up sand against the glass, and then scraping it away, or trying to climb the unclimbable.

And the water is full of blowing "snow", the crumbs of food tossed out by the crabs, (messy eaters), copepods and air bubbles, bits of torn seaweed, shreds of discarded hermit molts, more limpet poop, oyster spits, more fragments of algae. The crabs and hermits are happy in clear water, but the anemones (orange-striped green, burrowing, pink-tipped green, and plumose in this tank) love this nutritious snow soup.

The camera doesn't. I can train my eye not to see it, but the camera notices every little copepod antenna and every rotting spot on the seaweed.

So here's a hermit (and a bit of a second hermit) in her usual habitat, just the way she likes it, the way I would find their community on the shore (except there, if I get down to their level, they all up and leave):

Grainy hand hermit, Pagurus granosimanus, with a shell she's rolling around. It's too small for a new outfit, so maybe she's just playing. She has lost most of one red antenna; probably in an argument over a scrap of food.

I had to clean up the background, delete quite a bit of glass algae and a blurry anemone, and adjust the light just to make the hermit visible in the mess. Imagine algae spots and swimming tinies all over.

Down in the left corner is a swarm of copepods. The snail shell at the right is vacant; soon one of the growing hermits will claim it. Some of the limpet poop is visible to the right of that blue stone.

The seaweeds are green sea lettuce, well used, a dark red blade algae, some holey kelp blades; the hermits have been chomping on this all week. The yellow edges are where the red algae is dead and flaking off. I could remove this, for the look of it, but the hermits love to eat it, so it stays. Both the hermit's shell and the empty snail shell are coated with thick green algae. The yellow stuff in back is the kelp that came with its holdfast last week. I just checked; there are four hermits working on this at the moment.

One of my crabs is very pregnant. I've been trying to get a photo: she's not cooperating. One of these days; now that the days outside are so short, I'll have more time to wait for her.

Testing, testing. Experimenting with colour control.

I've been learning more about the controls on my camera. (There are so many, and the manual is so confusing!) An article on Digital Photography School alerted me to the Picture Control settings, and I've been experimenting with them. The author recommends using a Flat setting for landscapes; it reduces blowouts or too dark areas, but needs careful processing later.

I took a few photos on Flat. They turned out flat. There was too much guesswork involved on tiny things where I didn't already know what colours they should be.

I switched back to Standard, and then, on a whim, to Vivid. This setting emphasizes colours and contrast, not really my style in landscapes, especially the grey-green landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. But it never hurts to experiment.

I turned to the aquarium; here, a vivid setting might help. Colours fade underwater, especially when the photo is taken through algae-covered glass. And here are the first sample shots, some good, some not so good.

A mud snail, Batillaria attramentaria, eating algae off the glass. Lightened, background noise despeckled out, and sharpened.

A grainy hand hermit, Pagurus granosimanus. The vivid setting shows up the blue bumps on his legs and chelipeds.

A carnivorous snail eating an inoffensive algae eater. I saw it first on the glass, prying the tiny snail off. Once the little guy was captured, the predator let go and dropped to the sand.

A nude hermit, recently molted, resting before he goes looking for a new shell. This was well back in the tank, where usually everything is greyed out. Post processing was only needed to reduce noise and sharpen.

Turned around and heading down to look for a shell. Despeckled and sharpened only.

And one photo that didn't quite work:

Orange-striped green anemone, Halliplanela lineata, on the glass.

The anemone was surrounded by extreme pollution; bubbles and swimming thingies, luckily behind the critter, but still confusing. The vivid setting highlighted them all, so the background had to be cropped out and re-worked; a long, slow job. But I'm impressed by the pattern in the base, so I've included the photo.

I went to Brown's Bay in the sunshine, with the camera set to Vivid. Bad idea; I've deleted all of the landscape photos. But I got a few critters under the docks, where the setting seems to have been helpful. I'll process those tomorrow.

Not a warm fuzzy

Every week, Digital Photography School lays out a new challenge for their readers. Shiny things, heavy things, panoramas, etc. I try to join in when I can; it's a way to keep learning. This week, the challenge was "Warm Fuzzies". The sample photos and the submissions were as expected: kittens, babies, ducklings, blankets.

If only I had a cat!

I thought about it a while, then decided this was not for me. My critters are not fuzzy, they're not cuddly, they live in ice water. Not a match.

Later in the afternoon, changing the water in my tank, I found the 15-scale scale worm (an inch long) hiding in a bit of sea lettuce. And yes, he was cute, and fuzzy, and a nice, warm colour; maybe he'd fit the bill after all.

He didn't agree. First, he hid under a shred of eelgrass. I took that away.

Then he insisted on hanging out upside-down.

I turned him right side up, using that eelgrass. Then he hated the light in his four eyes, and kept running and running, twisting and turning, round and round and round, looking for a dark corner, never stopping because the saucer had no corners.

Blurry, not fuzzy at all.

What he was supposed to look like, except darker. Photo from 2010.

But then, as I was looking at the photos before I deleted them, I noticed something odd. Scale worms often lose a scale or two, and this one had lost most of one near the tail. And underneath those scales, he's an entirely different worm, with contrasting black and white stripes.

Zooming in on that tail.

Another look. Is that a spark plug on the end?

I looked at umpteen scale worm photos on the web, and didn't find any showing the body without scales. What I did find was scale worms from warmer places, all in bright, showy colours. Ours are dull browns and blacks, but maybe they're just as showy under their coats.

And I'll skip this weeks photo challenge.

Doing things backwards

I bought myself some camera goodies today; my belated selfie birthday present. A new lens, a Nikon Micro 60 mm. A flash to replace a good one I had that got lost. And an expensive - 2 whole bucks at the dollar store - reflecting screen/foam poster board.

I got home with it all, dropped the whole works on the kitchen table, unpacked the lens and attached it to the camera, and took a couple dozen sample shots, hand-held.

The instructions, which I read later, said to always use this lens with a tripod, but I was too impatient to take the couple of minutes to set it up. And I wiped down the outside of my tank, first, but left the inside as is; after all, I'd scrubbed it well yesterday. So of course, there's a new algae scum fuzzing up the glass. And all the photos are noisy, as a result.

I'm still happy. Even under those conditions, the lens performed better than the 40 mm on its best behaviour.

A few samples: I've done minimal processing on these; cropping, despeckling, reducing noise. And eliminating a few inconvenient copepods.

"Hail, fellow, well met!"

Hideaways.

This is not a great shot, but it would have been absolutely impossible with the other lens, even with the tripod and the lighting set up just right. This was a dark corner, in the back of the tank, with only a glimpse between waving eelgrass blades. The crab was just barely visible, and I hadn't even noticed the arm of the starfish in the clamshell. The backdrop is a rotting, ancient abalone shell.

Did I say I'm happy?

Happy, or at least hopeful, barnacle and his penis.

Peaches and the eelgrass ghost.

Balancing act. Tiny hermit on the knife edge of an old clamshell.

Apart from the noise, this lens cleans up the backgrounds considerably. Since the depth of field is so small, everything in back is blurred and blended together. In a busy tank, where I can't really control where my critters are going to pose, that's a real benefit.

I haven't unpacked the flash yet. That's tomorrow's treat. And then I'll set up the tripod and "reflector" and clean the glass properly, and take some more sample shots.

And there's a manual to read for the flash; it looks complicated. Every new model has to have more rabbits in hats and pigeons up sleeves, and it takes some doing to find them all and get them to behave. I'll be busy for a while.

Showy dressers

When I pick up a hermit crab on the beach, he's generally a grungy brownish black colour, maybe, if the sun is bright and he's not scrunched too tightly into his shell, showing a spot of blue on a knee, or a hint of orangey-red on an antenna. In everyday light, he matches the muddy sand he lives on. It makes sense out here where blending in is protection against becoming lunch for a sharp-eyed gull.

So I am often startled by the colours of a clean hermit in washed sand, under bright lighting.

Hairy hermit, Pagurus hirsutiusculus, with blue knees and eyes.

Zooming in.

Grainy hand hermit, Pagurus granosimamus, with orangey antennae and brown eyes.

Experimental aquarium photos

Taking photos of tank residents, I'm usually restricted to the first half inch or so on the other side of the glass. Beyond that, seaweed and swimmers, bubbles and shadows all get in the way. And there are already the scratches and algae on the glass itself to contend with. The photos are blurry, noisy, and dark, mostly unusable.

But the other day, I jammed the lens right up against the glass, ignored the obstructions, and aimed deep into the water. Here are the results, with just cropping and light level adjustment; I reduced the noise minimally, or not at all on some, in order to keep more of the detail.

The hermits love to climb into the anemone's mouth. They clean out detritus, and sometimes argue with her over a juicy shrimp. She doesn't seem to mind most of the time. This is one of the larger Hairy hermits, all pinkish from eating Violet Tunicates.

A smaller, blue hermit in a shell I brought from the pet store. There's a second hermit just behind a thin blade of red seaweed.

In the shadow of the eelgrass and sea lettuce.

A better view of Val's (the anemone's) side wall. I did smooth out most of the noise here, so distant detail is lost.

Farther back, two hermits on a dark brown, stumpy seaweed. The one in the orange whelk shell is a Grainy Hand hermit. No noise correction, no spot removal.

25 minutes later, a smaller Hairy hermit has climbed on top, for a better view.

A bit closer, on the side wall. An Asian mud snail and his reflection.

(I'm recovering from surgery, working slowly, as I can. All is well.)

Tiny discoveries, and a mysterious bubble beastie

One of the anemones was getting itchy feet, wandering about, so I cranked up the camera to take his photo in transit. And got sidetracked by a few things I hadn't seen before.

First, the usual:

Hermit crab, with a tiny frozen shrimp. Nom, nom, nom!

Then, to smaller beasties:

A periwinkle snail. I keep trying to get photos of them eating.  This is the best so far, but a video would be better. 'nother day.

An amphipod, clinging to a blade of eelgrass, legs every which way. There are both green ones and brown in my tank.

Cropped down to show his marvellous compound eyes.

Amphipod eyes are compound as in other arthropods, and sessile, that is, unmovable.  Each eye consists of several hundred individual ommatidia, each of which has its own lens system, light-sensitive retinal cells, nerve leading to an optic ganglion, and each is thought to produce a single image.  Visual fields of adjacent ommatidia overlap, presumably producing good motion detection, but possibly less good resolution . . . it is probably safe to assume that they have good resolution and motion detection, and probably see in colour.  Hallberg et al. 1980 Zoomorphol 94: 279. (From A Snail's Odyssey)

And then I discovered a snail I didn't know was in my tank:

1/8 inch long, climbing on one of the thinnest eelgrass blades. I haven't identified him yet.

Smaller still; I went chasing limpets, to see if I could catch them eating. All around them, the copepods were cavorting:

Female copepod, carrying her egg case at the rear. She has one red eye, in the center of her forehead. (And when she is good, she is very good . . .) About 1 mm. long.

Something half the size of a copepod crawled off a limpet shell and went hiking up the glass wall.

A marine mite, about 0.5 mm.. I found 4 of them, all near limpets. The mess on its right middle leg is made up of diatoms and other debris.

Unlike the few insects and spiders which may be found in marine habitats but must breathe air, mites are able to absorb oxygen from the water so they can live at great depths. (From WallaWalla.edu Halacaridae.)

I didn't know this, so it seemed really weird to see this spider-like thing walking about underwater. It has 4 pairs of legs, like a spider, but holds one pair out in front as if they were antennae. Confusing little beastie.

Some marine mites are phytophagous (suck from plants/algae), some are predators, and some are parasites.

And while I tracked down these mites, with my hand microscope jammed up against the glass wall (and my neck twisted at an impossible angle; they insisted on hanging out on the wrong side of the tank), I noticed many even tinier groupings of bubbles on the glass. This was strange, because I'd scrubbed down the inside wall before I started taking photos. Where did these come from?

Two collections of bubbles and a copepod beside a limpet.

I thought I saw one group of bubbles move, so I zoomed in on it. But no; it was just there, not moving. And just as I was giving up, thinking maybe it was some sort of algae, it suddenly convulsed, waving 4 separate groups of bubbles about, like legs, for a moment, then settling down to rest again.

Other groups I checked showed the same behaviour. They come in different sizes and number of nodes or maybe branches, and they're all over the wall where the light is good, but not on the front (where my neck would be happier) with less direct light.

I haven't the faintest clue what they are. Help!

And I never did get a decent photo of the anemone. And now he's gone and jammed himself into an impossible corner. I hope he doesn't like it there.

Sneaking up on gramps

More trial shots of the aquarium residents.

"I'm the king of the castle."

"Now you're not!"

I changed the colour settings on the camera, from RGBs to AdobeRGB. The colours now seem more intense, maybe too intense. What do you think?

More macro lens work

So much to learn! I've been working on focus.

I tried using the tripod, but it didn't seem to help. Tried manual focus. That works, so far.

The burrowing anemone, in the tank, through slightly algaed glass.

One of the three orange striped anemones, waving gently in the current.

These were taken hand-held, the first because I couldn't get the tripod around that side of the tank, and the second to be able to follow the swaying eelgrass. Not too terrible for a first attempt at Manual focus.

I'm having fun!

It's a jungle out there ...

Who can tell what's lurking in the mist?

Failed test shot

My camera wasn't responding to what I was asking of it. "Taking photos in the dark; what's that about?" it said. So I took another, in an even darker spot. It didn't turn out; the colours are crazy and it's not exactly focused.

But I liked the result, so here it is.

Hermit, anemone, snails, barnacle.

It reminds me of one of the old still life paintings by the Dutch masters of the 17th century. I can't quite remember which.

Why was I taking photos in the dark? I'll show you tomorrow.

Babies, stick-in-the-muds, and Big Blue

It rained or blew all day. I puttered around, doing laundry and other uninspiring chores, and then rewarded myself, playing with my new toy, the little Sony Laurie bought me.

These are more or less random shots from the aquarium (random, in that I pointed the camera at anything that found itself a decent background.) with the camera still set on automatic everything, but without flash.

Ma Crab, in berry again. Showing off the feathery swimmerets that hold the developing eggs.

Close view of the babies. The eggs are transparent, so the eyes are visible.

These photos worked out much better than the ones I was taking with the Olympus, mostly because the camera is so fast and steady; Ma Crab kept moving about, but I was still able to get several decent shots, even this close.

Big Blue

Nothing needed to be adjusted in this photo but the white balance, to cope with the mixed lighting I was using. And, of course, cropping and resizing for the blog.

The small, stay-at-home anemones on the far wall.

The big, wandering anemone. I think he's grown another half-inch since he moved close to the pump.

I did clean this one up, just a bit, to reduce a too-bright light shining through the water surface at the upper left. There's still a hint of camera reflection, which I left untouched, and a few floaters. And again, cropping, white balance, and resizing.

I am more impressed with the camera with every session. So far, it's living up to the salesman's spiel.

Single-use camera

Christmas, December 25, 2011. (But I think we're really up to at least 2015.)

We dropped in to London Drugs this afternoon, hoping to pick up a pack of TP, and a cheap new phone for the entrance intercom. But we had to stop at the camera counter, and attracted the attention of our friendly salesperson. He had a camera he'd given his brother-in-law for Christmas, he said. His b-i-l loved it, and he was positive it was perfect for us. (I have to admit that my answer to, "How are you doing today?", which was, "Drooling," -- I was looking at the shelf of DSLRs -- may have encouraged him.)

It was a cheap Sony CyberShot, on sale, because a new lot is coming in. What he had to tell us, and show us, was how good it was at macros. He knows my weakness. It has a minimum of other functions; can't handle kids running, or sports, can't handle rough treatment, can't handle dust, or cold, or heat. But it switched to macro automatically when he pointed it at Laurie's sleeve from a couple of inches away, and took a photo that showed the texture of the individual threads, more accurately than my big old Olympus would.

What sold it, though, was that he held it flat against scratched, dusty glass, and took a photo through it. That's what I'm doing all the time with my aquarium; no matter how I clean the outside of the glass, there's always algae and other specks on the inside. The photo he took had no flaws, even zoomed in to its maximum. Wow!

Before I'd finished checking it over, Laurie said he'd buy it for me, for next year's Christmas. He's done that before. I think his calendar is off.

I brought it home and headed to the aquarium without even reading the manual. Here's the first shot I took, directly through the glass, on automatic everything.

Backside of a hermit, and the shrimp in the background.

This photo is as shot; cropped, resized for the blog, and sharpened, as usual, but not adjusted any other way. No need to fix the colour balance, nor the exposure, nor clone out the spots. Nothing to brag about, and the hermit wasn't co-operating, but better than I have been getting.

After a bit of experimentation, figuring out the optimal distances, I got the clearest photo of my big shrimp yet.

Coonstripe, now showing his stripes.

The pump was going for this photo, so the water was full of moving bubbles, and the sea lettuce he's sitting on was waving about. It still came out fairly clear, and with much more detail than I have gotten before, even in ideal conditions. Again, the camera was pressed flat against the glass. And the only adjustments I have made are the cropping, resizing, a slight increase in the contrast, and sharpening.

And I had never seen, before, that my shrimp has a toothed "sawblade" along the top of the rostrum. (From just behind the eyes to almost the tip of the front apppendages.) Right-click on the photo (open link, not image, in new tab) to see it full-size.

After all that, I went on to start reading the manual. I'm barely through the first part, and finding ways to improve already.

So, so far, I am pleased with the camera. I don't think it's going to the beach with me (sand and cold), nor will it be shoved in my purse (banging about), but except for extreme close-ups, it probably will replace the old Olympus, my preferred macro camera. I'll still use that for 1 mm. bugs, though. This one has a range of 2 inches or more; with the Olympus 55, I can get as close as 1/2 an inch away.

Thanks, Laurie!

In which I overstep my boundaries and get glared at.

The crabs in my aquarium are used to me. They keep on with their busy work, digging tunnels under the rocks, pushing sand up into piles outside their doors, rearranging the stones and shells around the entrances, even with my face and lens a few inches away from the glass.

(They're incredibly efficient diggers. They scramble deep under a big rock, sideways, and a minute later slide out again, pushing a load of sand with their claws. Back in they go, and out with more sand, pushing it up the slope until it crests the rise and doesn't slide back. I have seen them create a pile a couple of inches high overnight. They don't stop for coffee breaks.)

They come out of their tunnels and burrows after dark, and sit waiting for me to arrive with food, a piece of dried minnow, crumbled into bite-sized pieces. (Crab and hermit bite-size, not mine.) I don't know if they would prefer another feeding time, but at night is when the big polychaete worms come out, too; I love to watch them creep out of their holes, ever so slowly, sniffing here and there, this way and that. Then, suddenly, they grab a choice bit of fish out of a crabs' pincers and whip it down into the sand before the crab can say, "Stop, thief!"

When I clean the tank, I fish them out with my hand, and put them in a bowl with the hermits and snails. They're ok with that. Afterwards, they go back to their digging, repairing the comfortable burrows that I filled with sand. No worse that the incoming tide would have done; that's life.

With that background, I thought that they really wouldn't mind a visit to my new underwater photo studio; they know me, they can trust me. I've never hurt them yet.

I was wrong. They panicked. They scrabbled around frantically, trying to hide under each other, under the stones, against the opposite side of wherever the camera was.

The baby, feeling safe for the moment.

Spots, watching me over the back of his head. That's Snowflake underneath him, and a piece of fish at his back feet. I thought that would placate them. It didn't.

 Snowflake and Rusty.

Five minutes, maybe ten. The crabs were trying to burrow underneath my glass divider, tossing stones behind them. I gave up, and replaced them in the aquarium; they scuttled for cover. The next day, they had recovered, and were glaring at me through their glass wall. This wall is good; it's familiar. Even if it's as see-through as the other.

I think the first three, Baby, Spots, and Snowflake are green shore crabs, Hemigrapsus oregonensis. The colour and patterns vary, especially in juveniles, but the legs are hairy. Even the littlest one shows a bit of hair; look closely. Rusty, the dark red one, may be a purple shore crab, Hemigrapsus nudus (nude or naked); these are missing the hair. In the right light, I can see the purple spots on his pincers.